South Korean Women Sue U.S. Military for Decades-Long Role in Sex Trade

Dozens of "comfort women" filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit to target the U.S. military’s role in their exploitation.

By Danielle Han | September 9, 2025 | 10:24am

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South Korean Women Sue U.S. Military for Decades-Long Role in Sex Trade

A Naval base in Busan, South Korea. Photo: Getty Images

When America’s wacko-in-command signed an executive order on Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense into the Department of War, many of his lackeys hit the ground running. Pete Hegseth ran straight to social media to brag about his new door decoration, the Washington Post’s editorial board defended the name change, and the Pentagon snappily changed its Twitter handle to @DeptofWar. But across the Pacific and amid all the ado, South Korean women were gearing up on a front of their own: On Monday, they filed a lawsuit against the U.S. army to hold it accountable for its role in their prostitution.

In the first-of-their-kind proceedings, dozens of “comfort women” (South Koreans forced to work in military brothels) have targeted the U.S. military for supporting a sex trade that essentially—and gruesomely—serviced American soldiers, boosted the U.S. economy, and improved bilateral relations. Announced at a news conference and reported by the New York Times, the lawsuit comes about three years after a similar one was filed against the South Korean government, in which it was found guilty of encouraging the prostitution and forcing victims to be treated for STIs and STDs in a “systematic and violent” manner. “It was terrible,” one former sex worker recalled during the proceedings. “And we believe that the government was responsible for its negligence.” From the NYT:

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Under rules that the U.S. military and South Korean officials worked out, comfort women had to be tested twice a week, according to the women and unsealed documents. The U.S. military conducted random inspections at clubs, rounding up women without a valid registration or V.D. test card. The women had to wear numbered badges or name tags at clubs, and the U.S. military kept “hot sheets” — or photo files of the women — at base clinics to help infected soldiers identify contacts.

The infected women, but not their G.I. partners, were locked up in facilities with barred windows where they were heavily dosed with penicillin; some died of penicillin shock, according to the women. The U.S. military demanded the isolation of the women in such facilities, and the local government acquiesced, the women’s lawyers said, citing supporting documents.

The history of South Korea’s comfort women begins with the country’s occupation during World War II, in which women and girls were pressured into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army from 1932 to 1945. But after signing the Korea-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty in 1953, American military presence was quick to rise in the Asian country, and with it, a market for sex workers. And young women and girls were used to fill the gap.

Despite their win against the South Korean government in 2023, the women are still pursuing justice—this time, to find the “real culprit[s]” of their trauma. And because they cannot directly file against the military, the lawsuit is against South Korea, again, but as a maneuver that would essentially demand for each victim both an apology and compensation of about $7,200 from the U.S. Army. (Minus the fact that no money will ever take back the barbarity, the costs would truly be but a drop in the bucket compared to Trump’s stupid departmental name-change, which is projected to cost at least $1 billion.)

Speaking under anonymity, one woman testified during Monday’s news conference that she was just 16 years old when she was prostituted to army soldiers. According to her, the U.S. military knew minors were a part of its sex-trade problem—but did nothing to actually intervene. But her story is not an anomaly. Speaking to Politico in 2015, another sex worker who had moved to one of South Korea’s “camptowns,” a common sight near American military bases, said she’d moved to the area in 1956 when she was just 18 years old. “Looking back,” she explained, “I think my body was not mine, but the government’s and the U.S. military’s.”

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